The ability and the need to distinguish products and services is at the forefront of requirements by many industries today. Solutions to provide add-ons, additional revenue streams, marketing, and corporate branding constantly being sought by various companies. Intrinsic to these environments is how to better utilize existing mediums or products to facilitate such solutions. For example, in the photographic industry, it is common place for a customer to receive with their photo prints, an index card that contains small sized images of all of the pictures that were developed. The index card typically is sized to match the size of prints ordered by the customer, such as 4×6, 5×7, etc. This index card may include a logo and or message provided by a fulfillment center or processor that handled the film and produced the index product. While this is great advertisement and branding for the processor, it seldom if at all does any good for the retail store or other partner provider with whom the customer placed the order. There exists a need to utilize the index prints for the benefit of the company that is on the fore-front of dealing with the customer (i.e., the retail center/partner provider). Even further, there exists a need to utilize an index print in a way that can be customized to individual retailers/partner providers. Further still, there exists a need to maximize the use of the area on the index print, without unduly compromising the display of the photo images. As such, there is a need for significant improvement in the index print product.
What is needed is an enhanced index print product that will facilitate and enable the ability to, in one aspect, define index print product content at retail/partner levels, and in another aspect, present content items in a location and size that is determined and maintainable by the retailer/partner. There is currently no efficient technique for conveying individualized index print products, let alone enabling retailers/providers to specify and maintain the content of the index print product.
Accordingly there is a need for an efficient, scalable, customizable and robust technique for providing targeted index print product offerings from retailers/partner providers to their customers.
The present invention fills these needs as well as other needs.